i have noticed that a lot of people look for political perfection in pop music. mostly this idea amuses me, since pop like all art comes from humans, a species that does not generate perfection, though we do so many other things well.

art is in a dance with us, it is multitudes inside infinite echo chambers having individual and collective experiences and changing in real time. i get excited when i see something i believe echo into the pop realm, when something strikes a chord with my emotional truths.

i rarely feel a visceral political-emotional thrum inside of music, usually the quality suffers under the weight of the politic. but anohni’s album ‘hopelessness’ is everything. explicitly a political text, aesthetically flawless/classic. everything.

there are many many lines on this album that make me want to curl up in a ball with the large scale weight of american responsibility, of being inside the structure of america, trying to make good on my miraculous life to leverage us toward some direction other than total global devastation.

‘why did you separate me from the earth?’
‘if you showed up at my door: i don’t love you anymore. you left me in a cage, my only defense was rage’
‘drone bomb me…explode my crystal guts’

and the science fiction – ‘we will never again give birth to violent men’, and one where she commits to time travel such that she doesn’t cross paths with this time – ‘i don’t want your future’…

it is sometimes healing to just hear the truth told beautifully, with no compromises.